Hi. I’m trying to lighten up the end-of-year Webdiary, but gee it’s hard. Anyone got something good to say about the year?

On December 15, former Webdiarist supremo Tim Dunlop, now in the US writing his weblog roadtosurfdom, wrote a compelling piece on the ASIO debacle called ‘Beyond left and right on an issue of national importance’. I highly recommend it.

Just as Queenslanders seemed to be the only people to realise what Michael Costa was starting with his ban on the recent WTO street march, maybe ex-South Africans have something to tell us about where we’re headed with draconian new police and spooks powers. Today Mel du Toit and Mike Johnson tell their stories.

Then Jack Robertson and Peter Woodforde respond to Gerard Henderson’s pronouncement of the death of fighting for principle in politics, Concede or you die, a lesson for lefties (smh). I reckon these hard-as-nails commentators who so dominate our newspapers are way-out-of-touch, and that NSW voters will let them know by just how much in March.

The new political correctness dominates the media much more that the political correctness it replaced after 1996 ever did. One Nation knocked the old form for six, and the Greens and community-focused independents will do the same for the new form. For signs of the times, see Alex Mitchell’s piece Mayors begin push on Parliament at sunherald.

For another antidote to high cynicism, read Alan Ramsey’s Saturday column, Brown pricks, PM deflates, at smh. If no-one fights for principle, there’s nothing to compromise about. It all becomes, as Alan wrote, an ever nastier game of who’s got the best spinner, the most powerful media allies, and the most cash from the richest mates:

“The Greens live in the forests, with all the other elves and goblins. But you have to admire their resolution and their values. And increasing numbers of voters, sick to death of debauched major party behaviour and slick, prostituted political values, look to the Greens as the conscience of political life.”

To end, Kate Wildermuth on SIEV-X.

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Mel du Toit in North Sydney

As a new Australian hailing from South Africa, I find the unfolding recent events so similar to SA. God help us if ASIO gets the Howard powers. Having lived through all the tumultuous tragic events in SA and detention without trial, I see so many glaring parallels.

Where will it stop? People “disappearing”? Newspapers with solid black panels of copy blocked out by “security” legislation? Pre-emptive strikes into Malaysia and Indonesia? Late night court sittings to extend detentions? And then the hatred and the inevitable bombs as the fundamentalists on opposing sides decide that detente is not working and the only solution is a “military” one?

Oh yes, and like what happened in Angola, our buddy Bush will then decide to pull the plug on monetary support for Howard’s military sojourns to blow up our neighbours and we’ll all be left to clean up the shit.

It looks like my personal political struggle will continue here in Australia backing the underdog – Bob Brown and The Greens.

Is this still the lucky country?

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Mike Johnson in Sydney

I lived though the apartheid police powers, predicated on the [white] perceived terrorist threat from “communists”. . . “amongst us, and advancing from the north [of Africa]”. My view is that Australians now just have no FRIGGING idea what they’re letting themselves into.

Under the SA regime:

1) No policeperson would talk to a journalist unless they had a police pass [issued by police with pic], and they could boot you out of a “crime” scene if you didn’t have one. I think I still have mine somewhere.

2) My share house was raided by security police twice. Once they took away my housemate, Jacqui Boulle [national head of the “end conscription campaign”] and held her in detention without access to lawyers, courts, family or doctors for two weeks. My phone was tapped – we used to get calls in the small hours of the morning with either heavy breathing or anonymous warnings that we were “being watched”.

3) Newspapers faced fines and closure and journalists and editors imprisonment if they did “anything that threatened the security of the state”. The catch? There was no government lawyer you could run anything by. They’d just say, “Well you just publish it and we’ll tell you tomorrow whether you’ve broken the law”!! The result: Self-censorship.

So our paper had a brainwave: Run all stories in full and lay them out [paste-up days], then get the company lawyers in, strip out just the sentences/words they’re worried about and we print the paper with lots of white space to give our readers an idea of what was being withheld from them. It worked for about a fortnight until the GOVERNMENT PASSED LAWS MAKING IT AN OFFENCE TO PUBLISH WHITE SPACE!!

4) As court reporter I covered a number of “terrorism” trials where the evidence that the government wanted heard was dealt with in open [show] court, while the rest was heard in camera by the judge [no jury trials there!]. I saw more judges return from adjournments wearing the black cap to pronounce the death sentence than I can count.

5) And yes, to reflect on your point about Bob Carr’s new police powers, once you’ve got these powers, like Mahatir you don’t have to worry about any political or journalistic opposition any more.

Now, instead of pressuring the Howard regime to drop the US and work with the UN to find a fix for the Palestinian question (a legit “fair go” cause in the Australian book, surely?) THE FRIGGING AUSTRALIAN POPULATION IS FAST ASLEEP OR WATCHING CRICKET!!!

There’s an old Boer cry to battle, “Opsaal, die bloedbad kom!” (used as the title of an article in the late 80s by political satirist Tom Sharpe, deported from South Africa for his books “Riotous Assembly” and “Indecent Exposure” which took the micky out of draconian apartheid laws). It means “Saddle up, the bloodbath is coming!”.

It’s the way I feel right now.

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That for which we are fighting

by Jack Robertson

If I was feeling ungenerous, I might take Gerard Henderson’s article on pragmatism versus principle in politics as an implicit suggestion that we should all try to find some ‘compromise’ with the way Osama bin Laden reckons the world should be run.

I’m not, so I won’t, but as a former soldier, I find his curious ‘general call to surrender’ on matters of principle more than a bit unsettling. This is especially so given the likelihood that our SAS may soon be risking their lives in Iraq to defend just that: democratic political principles.

Henderson seems to think that ‘pure principle’ is somehow not worth defending, not ever, and that idealistic ‘luvvies’ like me, who support Carmen Lawrence, fail to realise that ‘times have changed’; that because the majority is against her, she should simply ‘compromise’ before she even tries to make any stand. This is defeatist nonsense, not to mention entirely disingenuous, anyway.

For a sound ‘compromise’ is exactly what the ALP achieved here; Lawrence made her ‘pure’ stand, and the Labor Caucus duly responded with precisely the kind of ‘practical politics’ Henderson advocates. The formal position to which Crean and his troops worked their way was that she gracefully departed the shadow cabinet, but remained in the Parliamentary party.

This is how it should be. The modern ALP is a broad church, after all, and Lawrence will continue to argue her case from within on behalf of refugee ‘luvvies’ like me, thus ensuring that the party remains the forum for diverse ideas it has been ever since Gough Whitlam so radically reshaped it.

Henderson does correctly identify the important role ‘compromise’ plays in modern politics, but funnily enough he uses it to poke the wrong side. The Liberal Party, originally a broad, secular-liberal ‘church of many faiths’ but now a rather more narrow and ‘personalised’ political vehicle altogether, might benefit greatly from a more ‘compromising’ internal approach to dissenting views.

Who knows what kind of imaginative solutions our government might have come up with to a ‘problem’ like the Tampa, if it had heeded Henderson’s advice? (A more inclusive approach last October might also have had the ‘pragmatic’ wartime advantage of our RAN not being lumped with the ‘Pacific Solution’ now, leaving them free to concentrate on fighting terrorism alone.)

Despite what Henderson claims, political ‘principle’ is in fact the bedrock upon which any secure country must brace, and the real trick is in knowing when exactly it must be invoked.

Just imagine if that old ‘Lefty Luvvie’ John Curtin hadn’t got that ‘trick’ right, and had followed Henderson’s formula – ‘concede or die’ – when confronted by the pressure Winston Churchill placed upon him to divert our soldiers to fight in India, rather than return for the battle at home?

Churchill, who knew a thing or two about when not to ‘concede’ on ‘principle’ himself, must have been a formidable man to face down, and all Australians should be grateful that our greatest wartime Prime Minister made the right ‘pure’ choice on that occasion, and then had the grit to ‘stand firm’ when it mattered.

For what Henderson apparently fails to grasp is that political ‘pragmatism’ and political ‘principle’ are not always mutually exclusive. In fact, in times of war, when we ask our young people to risk death on our behalf, it is more often that the ‘principled’ stand is also the ‘practical’ one.

Our leaders must inspire our soldiers sufficiently to be willing to sacrifice everything, and the only way to do this is to embrace ‘pure’ core principles themselves. Greater love hath no woman than she should give her life for her country’s backroom political number-crunchers? I think not.

On balance, I think Henderson has got it dangerously wrong. Ultimately, our soldiers fight precisely so that leaders like Lawrence, Simon Crean, Brian Greig, Bob Brown and Len Harris will remain free to stand firm on principle when necessary, as these resolute politicians all did when John Howard, as it happened, refused to compromise on his ASIO Bill.

I do partly agree with Henderson, in the sense that the Prime Minister’s judgement here illustrates well how a stubborn refusal to compromise can sometimes represent an attempt to force, as he puts it, a ‘harsh right-wing or left-wing agenda’ upon the ‘overwhelming majority of Australians’. I also agree that at other times – as in Lawrence’s case – the parties to which such ‘uncompromising’ politicians belong might decide that the ‘pure’ stand is too electorally damaging to embrace.

But at yet other times – wartimes especially, as both ‘lefties’ like Curtin and ‘righties’ like Churchill knew well – the apparent ‘middle path’ of ‘easy compromise’ can in fact turn out to be the slipperiest slope there is. So Henderson is only half-right in his cynical view of the ‘art of democratic politics’: yes, it does require compromise, but the real art lies in not simply giving way on everything you believe, like some value-free ‘political fixer’, but in knowing when to compromise, and when to stand resolute and firm.

Right now, our ADF is counting on our politicians getting that balance right. Let’s hope there’s another John Curtin who proves up to that subtle task, whether she be ‘soppy lefty luvvie’, ‘stern righty pragmatist’ or perhaps somewhere in between.

Jack Robertson is a former Aide-de-Camp to Governor General Bill Hayden and the brother of a current member of the Australian SAS.

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Peter Woodforde in Canberra

Here is one word in reply to Gerard Henderson’s laborious, pencil-chewing essay on “expressive v instrumental politics” – Medicare. It was relentlessly hard-fought and hard-won (of course, these days Howard’s Liberals are working meanly and trickily to destroy it by stealth).

Concede or die, Gerard? No. Concede and die, probably in a degraded public health system.

Gerard needs to remember that the Australian idea of a fair go is both expression and instrument, which is why it is such anathema to the Right.

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Kate Wildermuth

I would like to make a correction to Brett Harrison’s statement in Where have all the flowers gone… (webdiaryDec16):

“The only people in Australia who even think about SIEV-X are refugee advocates and political opponents of the current Government, both for obvious reasons.”

There is at least one other person who cares enough to write about the issue. It’s Brett Harrison himself. He took the time to write. Instead of asking him why he felt so compelled to take the time to write and say he didn’t care about the drowning of 353 people, I’ll ask him something easy.

What is he doing to have Abu Quassey brought to Australia for trial? After all, it was not Tony Kevin who first raised that possibility. It was Senator Ellison and Mick Keelty from the Australian Federal Police. Megan Saunders’ article in The Age, ‘Minister draws smuggler hit list’ (28/07/02) says:

“The man alleged to be behind the disastrous Siev X vessel, which foundered off the Java coastline drowning 353 asylum-seekers, Abu Quassey, is also being sought by Australian police. Senator Ellison said three warrants were out for his arrest in relation to people-smuggling offences.

“Mr Quassey is in the custody of Indonesian police and is being tried in Indonesia for immigration offences. ‘We are liaising with Indonesian authorities in relation to Mr Abu Quassey and we have received great co-operation from Indonesian authorities,’ Senator Ellison said. ‘We are very keen to have Mr Quassey front an Australian court to answer those three charges.”

John Howard cared enough to proclaim that SIEV-X sank in Indonesian waters when it did not. Senator Ellison cared enough to say they were very keen to have Mr Quassey front an Australian court. There are 354 reasons for bringing Abu Quassey to Australia for trial. Only one of them is that the Howard Government said they were keen to do so.

Mr Harrison, instead of telling us you don’t care now, answer this. Did you write a letter to complain you didn’t care when Senator Ellison was keen to have Abu Quassey brought to Australia for trial? Or is it only now the disruption activies have been raised?

Mr Harrison, what are you are doing to keep this Government to its word to bring Abu Quassey to Australia for trial?